Day One rumblings at Winter Meetings

Day one of the winter meetings are nearly over in Indianapolis, and the Blue Jays are virtually in the same spot they were 24 hours ago.

Most of this information is based off of tweets from Jordan Bastian, but it sounds like Alex Anthopoulos and the Blue Jays crew are basically sitting back and letting other clubs come to them when it comes to trade offers for Roy Halladay.

“Jays GM is limiting the number of people in his suite for any talks. 1-on-1 or 2-on-2 discussions only. One way to limit leaks to the media.”

Note that this is almost the exact opposite strategy used by J.P. Ricciardi when he was shopping Roy Halladay at the trade deadline. AA wants to keep any potential deals close to his chest and not reveal them to the media unless they are absolutely certain a trade will be made.

“Angels will play for Halladay. But only if he’ll agree to sign long term. Joe Saunders possible bait.”

Any sort of decent player package including major league talent would obviously have to include some sort of contract extension negotiations for Halladay. Personally, I am not crazy about Joe Saunders – would much rather prefer someone like Jered Weaver or Ervin Santana, but the asking price is likely too high.

Finally, other piece of news that affects the Blue Jays somewhat – Rod Barajas is expected to decline arbritation from the Blue Jays. No real surprise here … the bigger surprise is the lack of talk from other teams about signing Rod Barajas.

As far as the catcher’s position is concerned, he provides a decent amount of pop, however clubs could be avoiding that .258 OBP like the plague.

Unfortunately, not much flash or drama from day one of baseball’s winter meetings – the big announcement that Will Carroll alluded to on Twitter over the weekend was that Bloomberg is going to be involved with stat tracking in MLB. It’s not necessarily mind-blowing news to the average fan, but apparently it will have a huge impact for those within the industry.

Ian Hunter

Ian has been writing about the Toronto Blue Jays since 2007. He enjoyed the tail-end of the Roy Halladay era and vividly remembers the Alex Rodriguez "mine" incident. He'll also retell the story of Game 5 of the ALDS to his son for the next 20 years.

5 Comments

Since the first announcement was a bit of a letdown, I don't expect the second announcement to be any bigger. In fact, I'd be surprised if we ever find out what the next one is actually supposed to be.